Warfare: science as the enemy of religion?
English: Signature of Stephen Jay Gould (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) From what’s been said it seems that God lies outside the scope of the scientific method. In one sense science has nothing legitimate to say about God. As the great Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) rightly remarked, ‘science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can’t comment on it as scientists.’ In fact Dawkins and other New Atheists comment rather a lot on this matter, but perhaps that’s because they speak here primarily as militant atheists rather than scientists. While scholarship has shown that the origins of ‘scientific atheism’ as a faith tradition can be traced back to the eighteenth century, the New Atheism has given it a new importance and profile through its appeal to the natural sciences in defence of its atheist outlook. In the New Atheist world-view, ...